We stood in the shadows by the fence. I held in my pressel-switch and said softly, ‘Hotel One. On Red now.’
‘Zero Alpha, roger,’ answered the boss.
As promised, the door was open. We slipped into a short corridor and locked up behind us, shooting home the bolts at the top and bottom. A smell of cooking hung in the air. We took off our boots, stacked them in a neat heap and put on our clean trainers. Then, leaving the others to cover me, I went quietly forward, HK 53 at the ready, past the kitchen and into the hall.
The TV was on in one of the front rooms. I knocked on the door, pushed it open a foot or so and showed myself in the gap. The woman saw me first — a small, elderly person with white hair swept back in a bun. She gave a bit of a cry and stood up.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We’re here to look after you.’
The husband was a fierce-looking little fellow, with curly silver hair, dark eyebrows, and thick-rimmed glasses; he was wearing a fawn cardigan and matching slippers, like any retired professional. As soon as I saw him, I recognized his face from news bulletins and the papers.
From the darkness of the hall I asked him if the front curtains were fully drawn.
‘Sure they are,’ he said testily. ‘That was the first thing your people told us. We’ve got the old blackout blind pulled down as well.’ As he came towards me he said, ‘This is ridiculous,’ but not in a voice that carried much conviction. I caught a trace of whisky on his breath. He was easily old enough to be my father, so I didn’t feel I could give him too many orders, still less pull him around physically if he became difficult. I was glad to find that his irritation was only bluff; when I assured him that the threat was not only real but imminent, he agreed to move upstairs.
‘What I don’t understand is this,’ he said. ‘If you know they’re coming, why the heck can’t you intercept them before they get here?’
‘The trouble is, we don’t know where they’re coming from. We have other units outside, and with a bit of luck, they may get to the villains before they do any damage to the house. But we can’t take chances with your safety.’
Before I could stop her, his wife switched off the television.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘We’d better leave that on.’
She gave me a look, but went back to the channel they’d been on.
It turned out that the couple slept at the back of the house — the room in which we’d seen the light — and had another set in their bedroom. As quickly as we could, we got them safely in there, and told them that if they needed to go to the bathroom they mustn’t switch on any more lights.
‘Here,’ I said, getting out the flak-jackets. ‘If you don’t mind, put these on. They’re a bit heavy and uncomfortable, but they could just save your lives.’ Then I took the medical packs into the bathroom and opened them up so that the IV kits were immediately to hand.
Next we took a look round downstairs. The house was solidly built, with floors that didn’t bounce, and walls which felt good when you hit them. The whole place was tidy as could be. I found it hard to believe that the shit was about to be blown out of it. The front door was locked and bolted, but only medium-strong, and it had a half-moon of frosted glass above it. The thought of an RPG7 rocket coming through it was not amusing. The weapon was developed by the Russians more than thirty years ago, in the depths of the Cold War, for the express purpose of taking out British or American tanks; though extremely simple, it was capable of destroying any armoured vehicle, let alone an ordinary car or somebody’s front door. The chances were that if one came through into the hall, it would blow out the back wall of the house as well.
The only firefighting equipment was one ancient — looking extinguisher, but I put this ready, just inside the kitchen. Luckily the stairs started from the back of the hall and came forward towards the front, so that if we did get a rocket through the door, the main blast would be directed through the kitchen and out of the back door, rather than upwards. ‘Let’s get our boots out of the line of fire, anyway,’ said Pat, and we shifted them into a scullery.
Upstairs again, I saw that the landing ran across the back of the stairwell. Kneeling behind the whitepainted wooden banisters, we could cover the whole of the hall. If any assault party tried to follow up a rocket, we could take them out from there, no bother.
I checked all the doors, and once I’d got the layout I detailed Jimmy to remain in the back bedroom with our hosts, in case anyone started trying to come through the rear window. In the front bedroom on the left, facing forwards, we slung a sheet of polythene at a forty-five degree angle, fixing it to the walls with drawing-pins brought for the purpose, so that we could look through the window without being visible from outside. To complete the optical illusion, we pinned our thin black cloth over the rear wall, cutting out background reflection.
Hardly had we done that when Pat, who was looking out, said, ‘Hey, there’s someone coming past.’
In the patchy illumination of the street-lamps we saw a young man in what looked like jeans and a black donkey jacket walk past from right to left. He was trying to maintain a nonchalant appearance, but we saw him take a sideways glance at the target.
‘One of their dickers, I bet,’ said Jimmy.
Sure enough, a moment later the Det came up with ‘Delta Two. That same dicker’s gone back the other way.’
‘Hotel One,’ I called. ‘Established on target.’
‘Roger,’ answered the boss. ‘Stand by.’
I was still new enough to the game to be surprised by the immediacy with which our team’s voices jumped out of the night. I knew that the boss was miles away, at the desk, and that the Det guys were spread out all over town. But from the speed with which people came up on the air, they might have been in a tight ring round the target.
I decided that when, or if, the attack came, we’d go to ground in the blacked-out bedroom and close the door. Then, immediately after the explosion, we’d whip out on to the landing so that we could drop anyone who came into the hall below. We therefore constructed a kind of shelter out of the two single beds, tipping them on edge and tilting the tops inwards against each other, like a tent, with the mattresses on the floor to give some protection from below, and room for us to crawl in so that we had cover in case the ceiling came down. Then I set the two ambush lights out, one on either side of the landing, so that if anyone fired up at them, the rounds would go well clear of our own position. I ran the wires round the landing so that the switch was at the point where I intended to be.
Waiting was no joke. We’d turned up the sound of the TV a bit, so that we could hear it burbling away, and the ever-changing light from the screen flickered out into the hall. Occasionally one of us went down to open or close the living-room door a bit, so that any watcher would see a change in the light showing through the frosted glass over the front door, and conclude that Quinlan and his wife were in or out of the room. When I went down for the last time I left the door shut, as if they were both in the room. Each of those trips downstairs made my hair crawl. What if the players had given the Det the slip, and were lining their rocketlauncher up at that very moment?
In fact, we had plenty of radio chat to keep us abreast of the situation. At 2215 the same dicker made a third pass. He’d taken the trouble to go round in a big circle, so that he came by in the same direction as on his earlier appearance, and gave the casual impression of being another walker going the same way. But the Det knew him too well, and reported a definite sighting. After that, though, no other pedestrians showed, and we guessed the strike was coming up. Our intercept cars had taken up strategic positions in surrounding streets, in case the hit-car escaped immediate ambush, and they too came on the air occasionally, with callsigns India One, India Two and so on.